Facebook: FAIL

We've been tilting toward this one since about the same time we called Time of Death of Web 2.0, a good six months before Techcrunch dared the same proclamation -- AFTER it mattered.

Today, we are officially calling the end of Facebook's reign and the rise of the Friendfeed model. In the end, open, transparent, flexible, and uncompromisingly adaptable wins over closed, walled, proprietary. AGAIN.

All this clamoring to "Connect" suddenly is the last desperate grasping. "Oh wait, we didn't mean to be "that" Closed." Grasping that may last a couple years; nonetheless, AOL-style Game Over.

The analogy of Apple's success is often paraded as a kind of ultimate victory for the closed and proprietary, but what is MacOS actually built upon? A custom version of an OPEN *IX OPERATING SYSTEM. Underneath it all, is essentially BSD, right?

So Apple is actually the ultimate triumph of OPEN SOFTWARE PLATFORMS with the option of building unique, custom, supported builds. It is also the triumph of USER-CENTRIC DESIGN.

Friendfeed is the current social web fire hose most headed in that direction; however, whoever can blow away Friendfeed's HUMAN INFORMATION PROCESSING (HIP) interface, could knock them down a notch in a matter of weeks or months.

Yep, we're also today asserting first claim upon the Era of HIP UI. The bottleneck has become Human Attention and Human Information Processing capabilities. As humans, we each possess varying asymptotic natural aptitudes; however, we share the fundamental ASYMPTOTIC characteristic of reaching a point beyond which we simply CANNOT EFFECTIVELY PARSE, UNDERSTAND, AND SYNTHESIZE *MORE* KNOWLEDGE per unit time.

Call it "Peak Cognition" to play on the peak oil phenomenon. This point is relatively tangential here, yet fundamental to where we go NEXT. Everyone knows where we've BEEN. What we want to know and must DECIDE is where we choose to GO, from here. It's not written in any stars, it's created in our every day CHOICES.

NOBODY can predict the future; rather, every day we contribute to BUILDING our future. So, you can simply ask yourself, which future am *I* building today? Is this really the future I want? If not, STOP IT. Make a better choice.

Bottom line for this post: Facebook's Fleeting Billion Trillion Dollar Moment has passed. Zuckerberg missed it.

FAIL.

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TokBox: The Trillian++ of Video Messaging?

Tokbox keeps Unbundling, Unleashing, Integratin' n' Rockin' Video Messaging

• Share YouTube Videos, Slideshares and more during video calls!
• Video IM to nearly every platform
• Super easy video mail

Latest Newsletter:

Dear TokBox friends,

We’ve been listening to your feature suggestions! Here’s the lowdown on what we've built...

All Eyes on Instant Messaging
As you may have noticed, we've just released a newer, more connected TokBox than ever before. In a very ambitious effort by our fantastic engineering team, you can now video call all your friends through AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. We think that’s pretty rad.

Friends, friends, and more friends
TokBox is all about connecting to your friends and family, and we've made it easier for them to see your gorgeous mug any day, every day. Now whenever someone adds you as a friend you'll get an email update and a humongous red button at the top of your Friend List telling you someone wants to be your "Friend" and chat you up. You'll soon have more friends than you could want! Which brings us to...

Privacy!
Too much of a good thing is never a good thing, so we've hooked up all sorts of ways for you to block those unwanted callers, video mails, anything you deem "too much information". Go to the "Privacy" link near the bottom of the left-hand pane, and block, deny, and flat out stop all forms of unwanted contact. The lovely Lauren can tell you all about it.

As always, stay tuned. Much more is on the way.
Now it’s up to you to help us improve and make TokBox greater than ever. Call us. Send us vmail. Email us (email? seriously? I hear TokBox vmail is all the rage). We love you. Thank you for all the support.

- The TokBox Team

User As Content: Knight News Competition Entry

Okay, it's ready for your Full Flamage. Please do comment, rate, berate, belittle, destroy, discredit, dismiss, mock, and otherwise make it better. If you click now, it might not be too late to be first to cast the first stone!

User As Content: Revenue Share-Enabling Software for Social Media Contributors

Create an Extensible Persistent Augmented Social Cognition Mindspace

It appears to me that the extraordinary attendees of Singularity Summit 3 have the opportunity to create something on a scale that has not yet ever existed. For lack of a better term we can refer to it as an Extensible Persistent Augmented Social Cognition Mindspace (ASCM). I saw someone tweet the idea of keyboard-mediated Digital Mental Telepathy. However you prefer to conceptualize it, the opportunity that appears to us here is to provide a specific space for SAM (Singularity Audience Mind) to keep thinking in a manner and fashion that we all experienced during the summit itself. For now, that space is #samthinks.

1640PDT 26Oct08 UPDATE: Apparently in between uplifting new civilizations in SPORE on a lazy post-summit Sunday afternoon, and while the markets were all closed and nobody could protest, @silverton and @elbizri has a little fun drafting a quick story of evolution from the lexically aesthetic, but 10 character-heavy #samthinks to the 60% information payload improvement of #samz

It's worth noting that I fully recognize the quality of immediacy by which a physical conference creates a field that significantly focuses the behavior of the participants within the ASCM. We might experiment with other timed, scheduled, planned, and impromptu online means and methods to emulate that immediacy, moving forward.

Or, we might be able to pose some challenging question in the context of, "I wonder what Sam thinks?" and learn that answer relatively quickly, if partially, as only portions of SAM might be alert, firing, and available for handling an individual interrupt request at any given time.

Or it could simply not prove worthwhile at all. Remember, a FAIL case is nothing but that, a signal to end one process and spawn another. FAIL is particularly GOOD when you can quantify it and flag it without wasting cycles, right?

Feel free to share the tinyURL for this idea http://tinyurl.com/samthinks with others whom you believe might be interested.

UPDATE: The "perfection appeal" of having a custom tinyurl that matched the rest of the program gave way to the argument for maximum carrying capacity for individual messages. While that URL will still work, here's the samz version http://tiny.cc/samz

UPDATE: @mcmurrak points out that I also missed registering @samz ;-(

UPDATE: Multi-topic or -domain version of the experiment possible with TweetGrid.


Onward.

Create Greasemonkey for Chrome

Yeah, you *thought* you had another original idea, right? But too late again, Kazuho Oku has done it with Greasemetal. Not to say you can't do better; but you're just not FIRST. Again.

Invent a Camera that Reads Bedtime Stories

Okay, so Ray's Read-Aloud Camera is a bit dated and no, you probably wouldn't use it primarily to read bedtime stories; but you could if you wanted to. This is mostly to check out the Brightcove syndication thingie.

Establish FM Radio in Nepal

The Real Innovators beat you to it a lifetime ago in Internet years.

Scattered Frequencies: Radio Networking in Nepal (2002)

Click the play button to begin.

Gen U

I'm dubbing the current tween generation as Generation U (Gen U) and assert that it is named here on too.late, FIRST, until someone can show me otherwise. Also, it could be the LAST use of the moniker, if nobody cares or agrees. It's not like there's a huge risk/reward disincentive to play around with such terminology, right? :-)

Gen U makes sense as a generational identifier because this cohort is growing up in a completely video-centric YOUniverse that doesn't even care if there is something called "the internet."

The Internet is Irrelevant. WE matter, and WE can just vidphone in a thousand different ways. You're a retard if you consider pervasive P2P video novel or innovative in any way. It's just "the way things have always been."

Content is still King; however, everyday video Communication as Content, User As Content, is now co-equal Queen.

Exponentially expanding TMI is a fundamental Challenge for Gen U; finding the Right Amount of What Matters is one Gen U quotidian ambition. *Defining* What Matters and setting the dominoes of viral distribution in motion are a big part of what separates the Popular Kids; aka, bell cows, opinion leaders, etc., from the herd.

Young Geniuses and Old Masters agree: it does not matter if it's threaded video conversation, vlogging, vcasting, or whatever. In the end, it's all about Attention Management and Efficient Context Navigation.

Set a new Tokbox World Record

Perhaps NOT too late to claim your own personal FIRST!

Feel free to try out this embed example at http://tinyurl.com/my-tokbox ... even if I'm not there at the time, invite 2 or 3 others to try it out. Our world record so far is 22 simultaneous users. Yes, Twenty-Two. It was crazy, but also crazy fun.

Why not see if you can break the record with YOUR friends? If you do, be sure to grab a screen capture (or better, a Jing Video or something) to show your accomplishment!

Here's how to conduct this unofficial user-generated experiment:

0. HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY. See #2 below.

1. Give everyone the url above http://tinyurl.com/my-tokbox and a time to login to that page.

2. Let everyone know that HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY. Echo cancellation may come later, but for now, anyone without headphones will ruin the experiment.

3. Let everyone know that as the room grows and conversation begins to become hard to follow, do like you would do in ANY crowded room - segment into smaller groups. To do this, click the (x) on the top left of several window panes to HIDE those windows. Don't worry, the person is still "there" and you could include them in your "discussion circle" later if you want to experiment.

4. This might result in some people having 15 "hidden" window panes and 5 active people in a conversation. Others may be able to track 15 people and only hide 5.

5. There will be overlap, don't worry about it. It's an experiment. If someone seems to not be responding to you, they may have "hidden" your window. DON'T FEEL DISSED! Enjoy the conversation with those who do respond and who constitute your current discussion group.

6. IF the thing doesn't crash, experiment suggesting to people, "hey, i'm going to hide you for a minute and try opening up another window pane."

7. IF you get 'interrupted' by someone bringing in one or more "too many" windows, don't sweat it! Just say, "Hi, I'm getting overloaded, going to block you for just a sec, okay?"

8. Above all, DON'T TAKE OFFENSE, and don't feel LEFT OUT. Have fun and experiment!

9. HEADPHONES ARE MANDATORY, okay? It's a teeny tiny hassle to have a crazy fun time for those interesting in the leading edge of P2P video conversation. :-)

Sue Secretary of Defense Over Mandatory Christian Prayer Sessions

The U.S. Army has been subjecting soldiers to fundamentalist Christian prayer ceremonies against their will during mandatory military events in violation of their basic constitutional rights, according to a new lawsuit filed against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates by a U.S. Army soldier.

Atheist Soldier Sues Gates Over Mandatory Christian Prayer Sessions
The Public Record - Tuesday, 30 September 2008

© The Public Record

Compose Classical Piano for Telephone Keypad

Okay, this is a little bit more right-brained than we generally post, but I'm happy to extend the challenge to find an earlier version of a more complex composition for "mixed phone format" (desk & mobile). After all, that's how we play "Too Late, Somebody Is Already Doing (Has Already Done) That!"
Thanks again to Digital Retina for this one!

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Exoskeletons Old News

Yeah, so you won't be first to create shipping exoskeletons, either. Move along ...

Create USEFUL Ammo-bots

Boston Dynamics: The Leader in Lifelike Human Simulation, has done it with BigDog. I don't know what all that weird noise is about, but sure it will be addressed in production models. It HAS to be silent to be of any use in the field, right?

Some browser will need to double click on the video to start.



The performance on ice, cinder block piles, and when kicked over is beyond impressive.

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Jott my voice to blog,...

Jott my voice to blog, this is a random post to the too late blog from a random restaurant in Palo Alto, you only get 30 seconds, but a lot of times that's adequate just to slap something on the blog. ____ cool, first I have seen that it works as(?) well. See you. listen

Powered by Jott

NOTE: This is one of the worst transcriptions I've seen so far, but I was pushing the envelope by using a speaker phone with plenty of background hum due to server noise. I've not edited the above in any way, so that you can get a realistic take of performance. I'll likely post a few more items here with the service and if it lives up to expectations, may never typo another post here again!

Keep having fun ..

Take Architecture into the 22nd Century

Contents:

• Jumeirah residents actually already moving in.
  
• The view from atop Burj Dubai as of last August.
  
• The planned Rotating Sky Tower by David Fisher.
  
• Sky Tower's completely Self-Sustaining Energy Footprint.
  

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Voice to Text to Twitter to Blog to Art to Email to Mobile to Office to Web to Go. Right.

Yikes. Too many to keep up with and I just don't have the time I once had to pretend to keep up. Rest assured that I always knew it was a vainglorious delusion ... but glorious ... and vain ... indeed it was.

jott.com - get simple back. as in, get simplicity back into your life, i guess. and actually, it is pretty damned simple. lists, groups, reminders, to-dos, calendars,

kwiry.com - See it? Hear it? Text it before you forget it with mobile txt message reminders to your computer. Might not be needed if you already jott'd it, though.

websketch.com - Impressive interface for sketching up your own websites. Drag and drop your new website into reality.

LaunchSplash.com - Fills a need of 100% of web startups - drop dead simple launch pages for your upcoming site - build community before you even have one.

ZoomProspector.com - Whether you're looking for your new office across the city or across the country, find the right location by a number of factors: cost, labor market, education level, job growth, incomes, etc.

Make getting off the grid, REALISTICALLY competitive with the grid

Solar City has done it. This is precisely the model required to rapidly ignite uptake of solar power. Theoretically, solar has always been a no-brainer; realistically, it's simply been too far out of reach to make a deep impact in the consumer residential mass market. The problem has always been the high initial startup cost, followed by prohibitive monthly costs for workin' folk.

However, if we workin' folk can make a reasonable one time investment, then immediately replace our utility bill with one that is equal or just a bit lower, NOW as everyday consumers, we can make that choice.

For global warming's sake, let's all hope that this New Financing For Solar catches on, quickly.

Wifi-enable any SD Camera

DEET'DUH'DEEEE!!! ON ME!!!!

How in the world did I miss this for nearly FOUR YEARS??? Oh well, it just validates my career choice of becoming expert at being Too Late To Be First, right? That said, there are some recent new developments that will make the Eye-Fi even faster and easier to use.

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Mate an iPod with a Beanie Baby

And you get a Chumby, apparently. Who knew?



Oh, and yes, the little critter speaks Wifi (even WPA2/AES-PSK) right from the cradle. While there is some very cool interactivity in this widget, it's too bad this virtual chumby doesn't let you change channels like the real thing. What you're seeing here is indeed one of my actual channels, (very minimal, suitable for grandma's coffee table ... hey, good name for the channel ... "coffee table" ... thanks for the idea).

A Chumby TV channel:

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Create a 24/7/365 Realtime, Real Life Librarian

Amy is a genius. It could work something like this.

And yeah, YOU, my friend are ... TOO LATE ... again ... as always.

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Use CPU heat to cool itself

Using Stirling Engine Theory. Now why didn't YOU think of that?

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Best Inventions of 2007

TIME magazine's Best Inventions Of The Year seem like a reasonable reference point. Of course, for the purposes of this blog, we call it the "So What List." As in, "so what? what are YOU going to invent in 2008 that's better, faster, cheaper, cooler, more useful? C'mon ... show us all how STUPID and SLOW we are because we're old and retarded and ONLY built cell phones and the internet.

Our generation gave you the FREEBIES of ubiquitous cell phones and the internet, we built those upon the FREEBIES of television and radio waves, which were built upon the FREEBIES of telephony and telegraphy, which was built upon the FREEBIES increasingly free scientific inquiry, which is built upon the FREEBIE of the relentless pursuit of knowledge and self-improvement.

So your opportunity to spite us all is 100% FREE. You don't need money, don't need fame, don't need no credit card to ride on this train.

So what are YOU doing to make things better, gurl and boi geniuses? Your assignment, as I've repeated here from time to time, is to BEAT CELL PHONES AND THE INTERNET. Before the telegraph, nobody could imagine sending signals over a wire. Before the telephone, nobody believed that voice could travel on that same wire. The same has been true of each successive generation of invention. So don't give me any whining about how "you can't possibly know" what to do next ... unless you're more STUPID AND LAME than the RETARDED OLD PEOPLE, of course.

Everyone else in the history of the earth has done it, so what's your bitchy little excuse?

C'mon, hotshots ... show me how stupid, old, boring, and retarded we are for only building these lame cellular intertubeweb thingies designed by Al Gore's brain soaked in a vat of Rock Star energy drink ... c'mon and show us what you have that TOPS CELL PHONES AND THE INTERNET.

Hello-ooo ... deet-duh-dee!!! ... we're WAAAAITING geniuses .... c'mon ... we're all so OLD and LAME and have nothing to contribute ... and you're so young and brilliant and superior based upon your VAST experience and education, right? This should be a slam dunk for you and you get the enjoyment of rubbing our faces in it!

Actually become a Fly on the Wall

Hi, Mems!

A microsystem-controlled insect (HI-MEMS, Hybrid Insect Micro-Electrico-Mechanical Systems) has a circuit board protruding from the top of its midsection. Probes are inserted into the dorsoventral and dorsolongitudinal flight muscles.A driving voltage of 5 volts causes the muscles (two pairs) to move for flight and maneuvering.

Get Online Annotation RIGHT

Far from the first attempt, Diigo calls this Social Annotation: Seamless Integration of Social Bookmarking, Web Highlighter, Sticky-Note & Clipping. Whatever it is, it's the first I've seen of this magnitude in functionality.

Actually Scale Monetizable Multicasting for the Masses

As far as I'm aware, this is a first for P2P-casting (aka, a hack of multicasting) with sufficiently compelling content and built to a scale that could actually result in a sustainable adoption path. Further proof that killing P2P traffic is a BAD idea for innovation, for business, for content creators, for markets, for customers.

Be the First Public University on Mars

Well, to LAND there, anyway. MIT? Nope. CalTech? Nope. RPI? Nope. Stanford Robotics? Nope.

This TLTBF goes to those wily Wildcat engineers at the University of Arizona. Why Arizona's red-headed step child Tucson would call it the Phoenix Mars Mission is beyond me, personally; but hey, that's the prerogative of being first, right? We get to call it whatever the hell we damned well please.

Peer-to-Peer Mesh Network The Entire Planet

While we've been TALKING about this, Meraki has been BUILDING IT.

While props go to FON for really innovating this Consumer-Level Shared Mesh Node approach, Meraki's approach seeks to literally cover the globe with affordable internet access which can scale for speed and growth over time.

Utterly Outstanding.

[Meraki's] plug-and-play solution makes it easy to extend the reach of your Internet connection to every corner of your neighborhood. Our custom setup utility makes configuration a breeze and our repeaters are simple to install – all you have to do is plug them in.